Category Archives: Web Design

An e-commerce platform is required to be updated with time to ensure usage of advanced technical tools and easy availability to online users. The decision to update the platform can result in many good changes for the brand. But the process to update it should be done in an accurate way, unless the website may lose its charm on search engines and pose serious problems to the platform.

If you are planning e-commerce website migration, here are things to remember to ensure a problem-free process:

Prepare List Of Every Important URL On The Platform
Before starting the migration process, it is necessary to get URL of references you may need. In addition, if there are any broken links or existing redirects, add them into the list. If there’s a plan to change URL structure of the platform, ensure not to introduce redirect chains. It may affect the speed of servers and cause search results-related problems. To make the list, one can make use of Screaming Frog.

Decide The Changes
The process of migration may bring lots of structural changes to the platform. It is necessary to stay aware of these changes before finalizing the updates. Here, one should make sandbox to check database on new updated site before making the changes permanent on the domain. This process will help know outcomes of changes. During test implementation, one should ensure that it is set as noindex. It should be removed after the completion of update process. In this step, changes should be included in things like overall site, menu navigation, hierarchy and breadcrumb navigation.

Determine URLs Applied On Updated Site
It is necessary to know how to make page URLs and impacts of migration. Before the process starts, one should ensure that they are aware of URL naming conventions.

Construct Redirect Map: Legacy Site To Migrated Site
Here, one should use their knowledge on URL naming convention and set new guidelines and rules for .htaccess. By doing this, URLs can be redirected to the updated platform.

Attention To Manually Created Links
There will be two types of links on the website: dynamically created and manually created. Links that are static won’t get updated when the platform is updated. If the redirect map part is handled wisely, there will be no reason to worry. In this case, manually created links can be redirected to the new platform.

Attention To Authoritative Pages
Here, one should spend some time to make a list of most authoritative pages. Ahrefs and Open Site Explorer can be used to make the list in an effective manner. Apart from that, one can also use Google Analytics to recognize pages with even one visit in last few months. In this process, it is necessary to ensure that pages with online traffic are preserved carefully. The pages with most number of visitors should be given prominent status.

Keep Tracking Ranking Data
It is necessary to keep a close eye on the website rankings. Various tools, such as SEMrush, can be used to get ranking data in an effective manner. In addition, top keywords and keyword data should also be given the attention. Plus, changes in the keywords before and after the update should also be tracked.

Identify Site Page Prone To Be Missed
The update process should not lead to page missing incidents. If it happens, it could be due to neglecting static pages as the process only handles dynamically generated URLs, or because of inconsistent URL naming conventions. The third reason for the page miss can be problems in internal navigation of pages. All these issues should be considered before starting the migration process.

To avoid any such circumstance, number of URLs should be considered during test implementation.

Monitoring After Migration
Even when the platform is updated, crawl it to ensure everything has been done in an effective way. One should make sure that there’s no issue during the transfer and update process.

Technology has entered into 2017 where the role of smart devices has become vital. Every client expects modern technologies from the service provider for business growth all across the globe. Apart from the company’s web presence, reaping direct benefits from technology is equally important. So a basic business website is never enough, but a comprehensive, technically advanced and responsive website is the need of an hour.

Responsive web design, also known as RWD, is an approach that is used to adjust web pages or websites in a way that they could be viewed on every device that we have today.

Today where online shopping is the most effective and the easiest way to buy things, can you imagine a website that has just a desktop version? Several studies have already shown that majority of people buy products online using their smartphones, so you cannot imagine a retailer without a mobile website.

Undoubtedly the addition of responsive web design in the technical field has resulted into tremendous growth in the mobile web sector, but many believe it has some problems that Ethan Marcotte didn’t imagine while inventing the term a few years ago. They believe responsive design is killing a designer’s creativity.

As a professional web designer, do you really think that your creativity gets killed under tight restrictions, or it flourishes because you have challenges to address? Well, you may say that when it is about branding, responsive design’s work is impressive, but what about layout? When you have distinct classes of viewpoint, you need distinct designs. It is not an easy thing to do, because you don’t know the accurate dimensions of every phone or device’s screen.

In addition, a website’s design makes a connection between its different elements, and when you are asked to fill these elements in a device as small as credit cards, that connection gets disturbed.

In responsive designs, all the attention is paid to the size, and not the content. The question that arises here is: Whether a user really needs access to full content of a website?

With the introduction of responsive designs, designers are forced to keep their creativity aside and adapt their work to small screens. Then what is the best way to use responsive web design without ditching the creative side of a designer? There could be different designs of a website for different devices, but that’s not a real solution. Having more than one version of a website is not feasible, and even if you think about it, you will have to spend a huge amount on just the designing process of a website. Plus, a designer will need time and exact dimensions of every screen to design.

Is there a solution to the problem? Sadly, nobody knows the best way to use responsive design that doesn’t affect creativity of a designer. It is not wrong to say that although responsive design is an impressive tool, it is being used very early. If we really want diversity in web designing, it is necessary to implement other tools, such as CSS variables and container-queries.